Immryr wrote:Other than the ridiculous click bait headline this article is decent.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/won ... _tw-bottom
Its very common sense stuff if you ask me, and I'm really not sure why a huge amount of people seem to not want to learn from the past. It's an obvious cycle... Politicians/bankers/whoever fucks up the economy, people get pissed off, immigrants get blamed for problems caused by politicians/bankers, right wing rises to power.
Part of me almost wants to see it happen, like part of me wants to see a President Trump, so that we can have a few generations of people (perhaps) who are willing to say "yep, tried that, turned out pretty bad." But given our luck, we probably won't get Trump or a libertarian President or the Brexit, but the dream will live on, annoying the fuck out of everybody for decades to come. Or, we'll see the same pattern as Bush: Pretty universally agreed to be a bad thing, but make a few irrelevant tweaks to the same old formula, and ship it out in a new container. The part of the article about fascists in the '90s probably could have been expanded a bit to cover discredited political movements that, nevertheless, have morphed slightly to keep the dream alive - dismissing failures as a matter of personal style rather than a failure of vision and common sense.
I get the Brexit concerns, just like I get that Obamacare apparently has made things tough for some people. But that WaPo story has a really great line pointing out the idea that you can get all the good parts of the deal without any of the bad parts, i.e., without any responsibilities, without putting skin in the game. It cannot work; if everybody simply did everything to maximize their own interest, suddenly the whole system stops working. I forget who said it, but it's the same deal as with the stock market - if you've figured out the best routine to play the market, if everybody else does it too, at some point you'd have to start doing the opposite. I don't want to be dismissive to Brexit supporters but this does seem to be what it boils down to.
Aside from the overly zealous zero-sum thinking this implies, I think we'd all be better off just focusing more on the specific bugbears in the system. Brussels bureaucracy too costly? Then talk about that. A UK steel works can't get projects on the Continent due to hidden protectionism (this was an allegation in yesterday's
NPR Marketplace show segment on Brexit)? Well, the UK better focus on that issue, but how can a politician focus on that when the entire system is under fire?
A final analogy, from software. One developer joked to an extreme FOSS partisans that they were useful to him because the extremists, with their "our way or the highway" attitude, scared big businesses and made pragmatic middle-of-the-road open source look appealing by comparison. Unfortunately, with the Brexit campaign, there isn't an obvious more appealing alternative, nor one customer to persuade; inevitably this talk gets into the macro issues, facing an entire electorate. For any individual, either the status quo helps you or it doesn't, and so talking about the entire system as it is, rather than as it could be, does not let the Art of the Deal happen. The "big picture" is distracting from the many small issues that should be hammered out to make the single market work better. Worse still, if you think that politicians and big interests are out to get you, by threatening to pull out of the entire project, rather than making specific demands, they can talk about the good in the system, while ignoring the bad. This is exactly what I saw happening with Occupy Wall Street. To be sure, as a Bernie supporter I know you need to bring the heat, but it has to be on believable issues.
Plus, you cannot speak much German over in the UK or to be honest much of anything unless it is English so it 'broadens the mind' to leave let's say.
